Fast and Furious Immunity, Aphid Tricks, and Recycled Resistance Genes: Notes from the Kyoto Mini-Symposium

Read in on Medium (preferred). This report is based on the Kyoto Mini-Symposium on Plant–Microbe Interactions held on March 10th, 2026. The event was hosted by Ryohei Terauchi at the elegant Masukawa Hall at Kyoto University North Campus. The Kyoto mini-symposium on plant–microbe interactions packed a lot into one program. The talks spanned bacterial effectors, aphid immune suppression, cereal blast resistance, Rhizoctonia genomics, NRC signaling, and TALE biology in rice. Different systems, different organisms, different scales — but a few common threads kept surfacing: immune recognition is often layered and redundant; pathogens and pests keep hitting the same vulnerable host nodes; and structural and temporal biology are giving us a much sharper view of how these battles actually unfold. In other words, the old plant pathology classics are still here — effectors, R genes, HR, susceptibility genes — but the field is getting more mechanistic, more quantitative, and more deployable. The event itself featured talks by Sophien Kamoun, Kee Hoon Sohn, Hao-Xun Chang, Saskia Hogenhout, Chih-Hang Wu, Yukio Tosa, and Adam Bogdanove.